That weekend, I had to travel to another state for the wedding of a relative. Most of the people at the wedding had been receiving my emails each day during the deployment, so they seemed to feel as if they already knew me. My sister sat me at a table full of strangers and said, “Everyone, this is Lee. You all read his emails from Iraq. I’m sure you have questions for him.” And she walked away to talk to someone, leaving me alone with her friends.
I was taking a bite of wedding cake when a woman said, “What was your worst case?”
I thought, Lady, you do not want me to answer that.
As I took a sip of champagne, a man asked, “What does it feel like to watch a soldier bleed to death?”
I thought, It feels like you’re dying too. And like it’s your fault. And it’s worse than you can imagine.
On the plane home, I tried to make sense of why I’d felt so upset at the wedding and why I was so irritable and reclusive at work. I felt ridiculous, and I told myself that I shouldn’t be any different than I was before my deployment. I hadn’t even been in combat, after all. Regardless of whether I should have those feelings, though, I did have them, and they were ruining my life. Since I didn’t know what to do, I did what came naturally to me: I pretended that I was fine, stuffed all the memories of the war deep inside, and refused to think about them.
Over the next few months, I worked hard at acting more normal at work. But between patients and operations, I mostly sat in my office alone and stared at the walls.
The kids were happy in their new life with me, and I was happy when they were with me. But at night, between the nightmares and the brief intervals of sleep, I felt alone in the world.
One weekend I had to go to San Antonio for a professional meeting. Dennis and Patty invited me to dinner at their house after my meeting. When Dennis opened the door, he wrapped his arms around me and gave me a huge hug. Patty cried and told me how much she’d missed me. And then their daughter Lisa stepped around the corner. I knew Lisa before the war, when we sang together on the worship team at our church in San Antonio, and we had a few mutual friends. She is also a professional interior designer, and at Patty’s suggestion a few months before I had hired her to furnish my new house in Alabama. But I hadn’t known she was coming to dinner that night.
All four of us sat down at the table. Dennis said grace, and we all held hands during his prayer. When Lisa took my hand, I was startled — I felt something in her touch I hadn’t anticipated, though I’d been with her in social or professional situations several times before. I didn’t really know what it was that I was feeling, but I regretted Dennis’s “Amen.”
When it was time to leave that night, Lisa walked me to the door. Her hazel eyes caught the light just so, her soft voice had just the right tone, and her gentle spirit had just the right feel. I surprised myself when I said, “Would you like to have dinner with me sometime?”
She cocked her head a little and her eyes narrowed slightly. Her smile didn’t fade, but it relaxed just enough that I could have predicted her answer: “I don’t think that’s a good idea right now.”
When I turned to walk to the car, Lisa called, “But you could email me.”
After a few months of our emailing back and forth, I realized that I’d never before been in a relationship based purely on communication. We really got to know each other over those weeks because all we had was our words. I found her combination of intelligence, humor, and kindness to be beguiling. And she had her own story of how her faith had rescued her from trouble.
I called her one day and said, “So, since we’ve been talking for a while now, I wonder if you would reconsider letting me take you to dinner?”
The pause was shorter this time. “Yes. I would like that,” she said.
I flew to San Antonio the next weekend and picked up Lisa at her parents’ house. She was wearing a pink dress and had her hair pulled back. The last time I had gone on a first date with someone, I was nineteen and felt all the combinations of chemical and societal things that young people confuse with love. Now I had months of deep communication with someone a thousand miles away to make me believe I really knew who she was, and once I looked into her eyes across the dinner table that night in San Antonio, I knew exactly what it was that I felt, and I knew it was for all the right reasons.
I was in love.
I made a few more trips to San Antonio, and eventually we decided to introduce our children to each other. Lisa had Josh and Caity, twenty and eighteen at the time, and they fit in with my three like they’d all grown up together. After a while, my Kalyn and her Caity suggested that Lisa and I should get married.
One night after dinner we danced. When the song ended, I got on one knee and said, “Lisa, will you marry me?”
And so, one Saturday in May, at a little church in San Antonio, I looked up and saw Lisa standing in the back in a wedding gown. I looked into her eyes and smiled as I heard the echo of Chaplain W’s words from over a year ago: Pray more, worry less, let God do the rest.
We had written our own vows. One line said, “I will love your children not as step-anything, but as my own flesh and blood.”
When Lisa said, “I do,” I felt a fresh infusion of the peace God had first shown me on the mortared field in Iraq that day when I finally let go of the compulsion to control and worry that I’d held on to so tightly.
I kissed the bride.
The next four years of my life felt as if they lasted only a day. Lisa closed her interior design firm in San Antonio, and with her business experience and my medical expertise, we started a new practice together in Auburn, Alabama. We loved and nurtured each other’s hearts, and over time I found myself sleeping all night, with the war’s memories only rarely waking me. Each time, Lisa’s soothing words would help me push the war away again until it seemed like it might be gone forever. The kids were happy, and it felt very much as if my story was going to have a happy, almost fairy-tale ending.
And then I lost my mind.
CHAPTER 33
UNPACKING THE BAGS
One night in 2010, Lisa and I were sitting on the couch, flipping through channels on television.
Lisa had clicked through several shows when I suddenly shouted, “Stop! Go back.”
I was back in Iraq. On an HBO show called Generation Kill, American soldiers in their Humvees had just hit an IED, and Black Hawks were swooping in to rescue them. It was chaotic and noisy and my heart raced as we watched.
One of the actors portrayed a helicopter medic who bravely ran into the fight to help a fallen soldier. “We’ve got to get him to the hospital,” the medic yelled over the cacophony of battle.
“They’re taking him to my Balad, to my hospital,” I said to Lisa. “Those are the guys I took care of.”
For several weeks after we watched Generation Kill, I once again had nightmares about Iraq. Yeager bled to death over and over again, despite my efforts to save him, just as he had in real life. I could smell Maria’s burned flesh from the firebomb meant for her father. I could hear the screams and the explosions and feel the fear.
One night, I woke up crying. In a cold sweat, I kept trying to find my kids’ picture on the bedside table. “Honey, it’s okay,” Lisa said. “Lie down. You had another nightmare.”
When I realized that I was actually at home, I put my head back on the pillow and rolled over.
“You want to tell me about it?” Lisa said.
“It’s nothing,” I said. “Just a bad dream. I’m going back to sleep.”
I felt as if I were going crazy. Here I was, safe and sound — things were good, in both my practice and family life. I was happy, healthy, and out of the military. I had never shot anyone or been in combat. Why was I still tormented?
While treating real patients, I would daydream about patients I’d treated in Iraq. I became moody and irritable, and the lack of sleep began to affect me on every level.
One day as I was driving somewhere with Lisa, I stopped at a re
d light. A helicopter crossed the road above us.
The next thing I remember is Lisa saying, “Honey, are you all right?”
I turned to her. My heart was racing, and the driver of the car behind us was honking his horn. “What happened?” I said.
“You stared at that helicopter all the way through a green light,” she said.
When we got home, Lisa grabbed my arm and spun me around. “Lee, you have to talk to me. You’re having nightmares and zoning out, and you’re not acting like yourself. What’s wrong?”
I looked into Lisa’s eyes and knew she was right. Ashamed, I swallowed hard and said, “I can’t stop thinking about Iraq. When I saw that helicopter, I kept waiting for it to turn and land on the highway so I could operate on whoever was inside.”
I told her about the nightmares and the daydreams.
She said, “I think you need to start writing down some of the things that happened. It might help you get past it.”
I didn’t listen.
I continued to have dreams, sleepless nights, and depressed days.
One day at the hospital I bumped into a friend, a psychiatrist. “Steve,” I said, “do you have a minute?”
We grabbed a cup of coffee and sat down in the doctors’ lounge.
I fidgeted nervously, having trouble getting started, then gave him a thumbnail sketch of what I’d been through and what had been happening lately.
“So,” I said at the end of my confession, “do you think I’m nuts?”
Steve gave a gentle smile and squeezed my arm. Then he said, “You have symptoms of PTSD. You should try writing down specific memories you have. It can help you move on.”
I nearly choked on the coffee I was trying to swallow. “Come on — you’ve been talking to Lisa, haven’t you?”
He held up his hands. “Not me,” he said. “We’re not conspiring against you. Writing it down would help you get a handle on everything your mind is trying so hard not to remember.”
I shook my head. “How can I have PTSD? I wasn’t even in combat.”
“No,” Steve said, “but you were mortared and rocketed, and you had to sit there every day and wonder when and where the next one was going to land.”
I nodded and took a sip of coffee.
“And almost twenty-four hours a day,” he said, “you had to see and do things that were horrifying.”
“Yes,” I said.
“And when you got home from the war, what type of counseling or support did the Air Force offer you?”
I looked down. “None,” I said, nodding again.
Steve quietly said, “Lee, I’m surprised it’s taken so long for this to come out. What you’re feeling is perfectly normal. How long has it been since you looked at the things you brought home from the war?”
“I haven’t,” I said.
Steve leaned closer. “You mean you haven’t even pulled out those things to tell your wife about your experiences?”
“No. They’re all still in some trunks in my garage.”
Steve smiled. “Then here’s my prescription. Go home, get Lisa, and unpack your Iraq bags. Today. Tell her everything you went through, and then write it down.”
Lisa held my hand when we stepped into our garage that evening after having backed our cars out into the driveway. From the shelves against the wall, we pulled four black plastic trunks down onto the floor. Five years ago I had taped them shut to mail home. There they sat, still taped — I had never opened them. We got on our knees and opened them one at a time.
“What’s this?” Lisa asked as she examined the contents of the first trunk.
I took it from her hand. It was a Coke-can-sized plastic jar full of metal objects. I opened it up, dumped the objects in my hand, and stared at them for a few seconds.
“This one is an AK – 47 bullet I took out of a little Iraqi boy’s head,” I said. I could envision the boy, whom we’d called “Lucky,” while I told Lisa his story. Lucky had been at a soccer game, and someone had fired the rifle into the air to celebrate the winning goal. The bullet struck Lucky’s head but did little damage. Tim and I removed it, and Lucky was able to go home in three days with no long-term damage. Lisa’s eyes widened, and she rolled the bullet back and forth between her fingers.
“And this is a piece of shrapnel I removed from a Marine’s neck, but I couldn’t save him.”
As I put the memories back into the jar, Lisa reached for one: a semi-circular piece of metal with grooves on the inside of the curve, and a sharp, jagged edge. “What’s this one?” she said.
“That’s a piece of a rocket. I was walking to the PX one day and got caught out in the open. I had to hide by a concrete barrier during the mortar and rocket attack. The rocket blew up about two hundred feet away, but I saw this piece land about thirty feet away and decided to bring it home.”
Lisa was holding her breath. She slowly put the rocket fragment onto the floor of the garage, then put her hands on my leg. She started breathing again, and tears filled her eyes.
As I rummaged through the contents of those trunks, I found myself reliving the emotions I’d had when I first held them. Unpacking the uniforms and photographs and bits of metal that had been sitting in my garage for years made me feel that I was finally putting the war in its proper place — my past. But it felt like an odd trade — I had hauled a lot of emotional baggage to Iraq, and the war taught me to leave it there. Now, here I was physically unloading my trunks in an attempt to work through the mental luggage I’d brought home in exchange.
At the bottom of the last trunk was a USB flash drive. We took it into the house and used our Mac computer to open the files on the drive. It contained several thousand pictures I’d taken in Iraq, along with digital CT scans from many of the patients I’d taken care of there, all organized into file folders.
Lisa double-clicked a file folder labeled “American Surgical Cases,” and the little Mac pinwheel spun for a moment on the screen while the folder opened and displayed its contents. She pointed to the screen. “That’s odd,” she said. “All of these folders are labeled only with their creation date, except for one. Why did you keep this person’s name?”
I looked where she was pointing. For reasons I couldn’t remember, I had labeled one folder “Statzer, Paul.” I clicked on the folder, and Lisa watched as I played her a slideshow of the worst case I’d ever seen.
“How did he do?” Lisa asked.
“I have no idea. The odds were against him. He probably died before he got home.”
Lisa typed Statzer’s name into her Internet search engine.
I watched, disbelieving, as a video came up of a reporter interviewing Paul Statzer, very much alive.
I was shocked. There he was, missing half his skull, talking about the upcoming operation to rebuild his head. The reporter mentioned that Paul Statzer grew up in and still lives in a suburb of Pittsburgh, where I’d learned how to be a brain surgeon.
The news story explained that Sergeant Statzer had been three feet away from an IED when it detonated and blew off half of his head. He was transported to a hospital in Iraq, where doctors removed parts of his skull and brain and repaired the holes in his neck and face. An unidentified doctor called Sergeant Statzer’s family to tell them that he was unlikely to survive long enough to reach Walter Reed.
Lisa took my hand. “Breathe, honey. It’s okay.”
“Lisa, I was the doctor who called Statzer’s parents. Three other surgeons and I operated on him, but none of us really thought he would survive.”
“Here’s another link,” Lisa said. It led to the website of a teenager in Indiana named Alison Mansfield. Alison had started an organization called “Operation US Troop Support” after a fifth-grade assignment led her to discover the story of Sergeant Statzer. I read the story and saw again how the fog of war and the stretch of time can cloud facts. For example, she wrote that a nurse had called the Statzers that night, but I knew it had been me. Probably, the phone call from the nurse
came to the Statzers when Paul was in Landstuhl, Germany, before the final flight to Walter Reed.
Lisa and I kept clicking through Ms. Mansfield’s website, and we saw pictures of Paul playing golf, meeting congressmen, living his life. I shook my head.
“I can’t believe it,” I said.
“I think you should email Alison and see if she can arrange for you to talk to Paul,” Lisa said.
After a very long few days, we received a reply from Alison Mansfield. She wrote that Paul’s father, Jim, would like to speak with me.
So on a Tuesday afternoon at my office, Lisa held my hand while I timidly dialed Mr. Statzer’s phone number. After several rings, a man’s voice answered: “Jim Statzer.”
“Mr. Statzer, this is Dr. Lee Warren. I was the neurosurgeon who operated on your son in Iraq.”
“Are you the one who called me that night also?” he said.
“Yes, sir, I am.”
After a long pause, Mr. Statzer cleared his throat. “I don’t mean disrespect, Doctor,” he said, “but before I tell Paul about this I have to be sure this is real. Would you please tell me what I said to you after you told me Paul was alive?”
“I can,” I said. “Your exact words were, ‘Doctor, by the grace of God, I know my son is going to be okay.’ ”
Another pause, and Mr. Statzer said in a shaky, hushed tone, “Thank you for saving my son’s life.”
Over the next several minutes, he filled me in on what had happened to Paul after leaving Iraq. The doctors who treated him at Walter Reed Medical Center believed that his case was hopeless. Mr. and Mrs. Statzer, however, believed that Paul had survived this long for a reason and that his survival should be in God’s hands. They fought bravely to get the doctors to try harder, and miraculously, over time, Paul started to show signs of waking up.
Once it was clear that Paul’s neurological injuries would not necessarily end his life, neurosurgeons and plastic surgeons began to think about how to reconstruct his horrific skeletal injuries. Through a series of surgeries, Paul eventually had a new skull flap created out of plastic; he had skin grafts and bone grafts to rebuild the area around his missing left eye. After months at Walter Reed, Paul was able to transfer to a rehabilitation facility, where he eventually regained most of his memory and learned how to walk again.
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